Getting There: The aim of hunting

Published 12:19 pm, Saturday, August 3, 2013

Gail M. Williams comes to The Herald from the Odessa American. She will serve as lifestyles editor.

Gail M. Williams comes to The Herald from the Odessa American. She will serve as lifestyles editor.

Getting There: The aim of hunting

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Recently, I overheard two gentlemen discussing the nature of hunting as a sport. The gist of the conversation was, contrary to what many hunters say, the thrill of hunting is not in the pursuit, but in the kill, the power that hunters have to take a life.

I am not a hunter, so I couldn’t really say where the thrill lies. I suspect a little of both. But I think the gentlemen were missing a third element, even more basic to the nature of the hunter. That element is food.

When I was growing up, my dad kept a .30-06 hanging in his bedroom, cushioned against two nails with the rags he used to clean it. We kids never touched it, for the simple reason that we were told not to.

It was, in fact, more emphatic than that. Never touch a gun, never point a gun at another person, never point a finger or a stick at another person and say, “I’m going to kill you,” even in play. My parents knew that guns had a purpose — the purpose was to shoot animals, not human beings.

As we grew up, shooting or not shooting guns divided along gender lines. My brothers owned BB guns and eventually shotguns; my sisters and I did not. Unlike my sister Pat, who eventually took up hunting, I never had a desire to shoot a gun — and I don’t now.

But I knew that the animals raised on our farm, except for the pets, were raised for a purpose. Cows, pigs and chickens were butchered. My mom was an expert at nicking off a chicken’s head with a hatchet. The rest of us were generally involved in plucking and cleaning the chickens — for food.

When my dad was growing up during the Depression, he and his brothers supplemented the family larder by hunting. Similarly, my grandfather John Bjornhei on my mother’s side hunted and trapped animals. The hunting and trapping had a definite economic purpose.

Nowadays, most of us are removed from the process of killing and preparing animals for food. We buy our meat in a grocery store, cut up, ground and breaded beyond recognition.

It is true, of course, that we no longer “need” to hunt for food. When I was growing up, my father’s annual trips to the North Dakota Badlands for the opening of deer hunting season undoubtedly cost more than the price of the meat he brought back.

However, every hunter worth his or her salt knows that you don’t pursue and shoot a deer without being willing to walk down into the canyon to gut it, retrieve it and bring it home to butcher, or at least take it to your local butcher shop. Without the end product of food, the hunt is meaningless.

We can talk about gun registration, we can talk about the size of the weapons used and the caliber of the bullets, we can talk about never using guns to kill people except in defense of self, family or country.

But unless we’re willing to go all the way and become vegans, as some do, we have no right to condemn the men and women who hunt for food, as human beings have since before the beginning of recorded time.